Bob Ainsworth's Speech to Commissioned Military Officers
Following the Military Service Act, Secretary of State for National Service, Bob Ainsworth, gave an address to the commissioning of Army Officers. The address was recorded for the radio and broadcast to the nation. "In a short time each of you men will control the lives of a certain number of other men. You will have in your charge loyal but untrained citizens, who look to you for instruction and guidance. Your word will be their law. Your most casual remark will be remembered. Your mannerisms will be aped. Your clothing, your carriage, your vocabulary, your manner of command will be imitated. When you join your organisation you will find there a willing body of men who ask from you nothing more than the qualities that will command their respect, their loyalty and their obedience. They are perfectly ready and eager to follow you so long as you can convince them that you have these qualities. When the time comes that they are satisfied you do not possess them you might as well kiss yourself good-bye. Your usefulness in that organisation is at an end. How remarkably true this is in all manner of leadership. From the standpoint of society, the world may be divided into leaders and followers. The professions have their leaders, the financial world has its leaders. In all this leadership it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate from the element of pure leadership that selfish element of personal gain or advantage to the individual, without which any leadership would lose its value. It is in military service only, where men freely sacrifice their lives for a faith, where men are willing to suffer and die for the right or the prevention of a wrong, that we can hope to realise leadership in its most exalted and disinterested sense. Therefore, when I say leadership, I mean military leadership. In a few days the great mass of you men will receive commissions as officers. These commissions will not make you leaders; they will merely make you officers. They will place you in a position where you can become leaders if you possess the proper attributes. But you must make good, not so much with the men over you as with the men under you. The government, for which I am a cabinet member, have decided to introduce the Military Service Act. With a heavy heart and without subtle intention, we have had to call all able body men to arms. It shall be your responsibility to ensure they are welcomed to the army and are afitted to be part of the greatest military in the world. This, provided, the bill passes. You may bluff all of your men some of the time, but you can’t do it all the time. Men will not have confidence in an officer unless he knows his business, and he must know it from the ground up. The officer should know more about paper work than his first sergeant and company clerk put together; he should know more about messing than his mess sergeant; more about diseases of the horse than his troop farrier. He should be at least as good a shot as any man in his company. If the officer does not know, and demonstrates the fact that he does not know, it is entirely human for the soldier to say to himself, “To hell with him. He doesn’t know as much about this as I do,” and calmly disregard the instructions received. Become so well informed that men will hunt you up to ask questions; that your brother officers will say to one another, “Ask Smith – he knows.” And not only should each officer know thoroughly the duties of his own grade, but he should study those of the two grades next above him. In garrison or camp many instances will arise to try your temper and wreck the sweetness of your disposition. If at such times you “fly off the handle” you have no business to be in charge of men. For men in anger say and do things that they almost invariably regret afterward. An officer should never apologize to his men; also an officer should never be guilty of an act for which his sense of justice tells him he should apologize. A loud-mouthed, profane captain who is careless of his personal appearance will have a loud-mouthed, profane, dirty company. Remember what I tell you. Your company will be the reflection of yourself! If you have a rotten company it will be because you are a rotten captain. Self-sacrifice is essential to leadership. You will give, give, all the time. You will give of yourself physically, for the longest hours, the hardest work and the greatest responsibility are the lot of the captain. He is the first man up in the morning and the last man in at night. He works while others sleep. And, lastly, if you aspire to leadership, I would urge you to study men. Get under their skins and find out what is inside. Some men are quite different from what they appear to be on the surface. Determine the workings of their mind. You cannot know your opponent in this war in the same way. But you can know your own men. You can study each to determine wherein lies his strength and his weakness; which man can be relied upon to the last gasp and which cannot. Know your men, know your business, know yourself!" Category:The Imperial Constitution